In a sport whose most famous athletes often are white and usually
hail from the world’s most impressive mountain ranges,
Zeb Powell, a Black
Southerner, is one of snowboarding’s fastest rising and most recognizable
talents.
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It is a status that Powell, 21, is hoping to use to inspire a
new generation of snowboarders who may not yet see themselves in the sport.
“As of now, I’m kind of the face of Black snowboarding, which is
crazy to think,” Powell, who was born in North Carolina, said from his home in
Vermont, where he spent much of this winter sidelined with a torn meniscus. The
injury forced him to miss this year’s
X Games, the event at which he won a gold
medal in 2020, his rookie season.
It was a bummer to miss the competition, Powell said, but he has
long known the power of representation on slopes and on screens. As his online
influence grows — even outside the winter months — so too does his ability to
reach young athletes who do not see themselves in snow sports.
He can trace his rapid rise to a single trick he performed in
the snowboard Knuckle Huck competition at the 2020 X Games. In Knuckle Huck,
riders launch themselves into creative tricks from the knuckle, or front edge,
of a man-made jump.
On his first run of the night, Powell
performed a “coffin to method back flip,” sending the commentators, the crowd
and snowboarders watching around the world into a frenzy.
It was a trick Powell partially invented. In the instant before
he reached the edge of the jump, he lay on his back, then launched into a full
back flip, with a board grab from a supine position.
He not only took home a gold medal, but he also doubled his
social media followers overnight.
The hardware and the newfound following were both wins in his
book. Though he enjoys competing, he has always seen those events as a
necessary function to build and grow his visibility as an athlete. He is part of
a generation of athletes who find being a social media influencer as gratifying
as being a competitor — and sometimes as lucrative as being one.
“After X Games, I started having all these people reach out to
me, saying what an inspiration I am,” Powell said. “I wasn’t looking for this,
but now it’s there, so I wonder what I can do with it.”
With his knee on the mend, Powell’s attention remains trained on
filming, expanding his reach through social media and being the face of, and
for, young Black snowboarders. It has kept him busy during his injury and the
pandemic.
This offseason, he will be coaching at the High Cascade
snowboard camp in Mount Hood, Oregon. He hopes to spend more time mentoring,
with an eye on organizations like Hoods to Woods and the Chill Foundation,
which introduce board sports to underserved youth.
Powell’s influence in snowboarding, and his growing collection
of sponsors and accolades, is a far cry from where he started, in the tiny town
of Waynesville, North Carolina, on a skateboard.
He learned to snowboard on the wrong foot. A snowboard
instructor at his nearest ski resort, Cataloochee Ski Area in Maggie Valley,
North Carolina, had 7-year-old Powell try to ride in a regular stance, with his
left foot at the front of the board. He quickly realized he was a so-called
goofy foot rider, and switched to the right-foot-forward stance.
“I always liked flying through the air,” Powell said, calling
himself the guinea pig of his friend group. “So my friends would always make me
try these tricks, and I would just land them.”
He took the tricks he learned as a skateboarder and translated
them to the snow, quickly outgrowing his home turf. His parents soon sent him
to Woodward Copper snowboard camp in Colorado, where his talents were
recognized by one of his coaches, Chad Otterstrom.
“You just never knew what he was going to do, and he’d always
land on his feet,” Otterstrom, a professional snowboarder, said. He encouraged
Powell to enroll in Stratton Mountain School in Vermont, a private high school
with a focus on competitive winter sports.
Once again, just as on the slopes of Copper Mountain and at
Cataloochee, Powell was one of the few nonwhite athletes.
While he never felt “othered” as a Black athlete in a
predominantly white sport, he said, his ability to perform at an extremely high
level has been a buffer for him.
“It was mainly all-white,” Powell’s mother, Val, a kindergarten
teacher, said from the family’s home in Waynesville. “And there were a lot of
families who had a second
By his senior year, he had multiple sponsorship deals and
traveled the country for events, films and social media reels.
The size of his home mountain shaped Powell into a snowboarder
perfectly suited for Knuckle Huck. It may be the closest thing to what is
practiced in terrain parks and on mountains by recreational snowboarders, and
it is different from slopestyle, where riders fly down mountains while hitting
a variety of manicured obstacles, and the halfpipe, which was brought to the
mainstream by Shaun White in the 2006 Olympics.
As videos of Powell grinding down tree stumps or bombing into
drainage pipes began to pop up online, his profile started to increase.
“When I started
snowboarding, I didn’t have any influences other than a few older snowboarders
at our mountain,” Powell said. “But the more Black snowboarders there are in
the sport, the more there will be.”
“I’m making an impact through filming,” he added, pointing to
the young snowboarders that look up to him, that see themselves in his rise.
“They’re the next generation of snowboarders. They’re the next
me.”
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